ABSTRACT

Biomedical researchers can enhance the attractiveness and readability of their poster with careful use of typography—the font they choose, the font size and additional features such as the use of bold or colour. The headings they choose will help guide people through their poster and can provide a fast track to key data. Researchers can make a perfectly good poster with just one font, but if they do want more, two fonts are enough. Posters usually work better if they use bullet points rather than paragraphs for the body text. This is not an absolute rule, however—if they have very small sections of text may not need bullets. Although programs such as Power Point make it easy to insert sub-bullets—and even sub-sub-bullets —these are seldom really needed. Do not suddenly switch from circles to squares—make the type and size of bullets consistent throughout the poster.